


Indiana Jones and the Chinatown Ghosts

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Indiana Jones Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-11-21
Updated: 2006-11-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 02:15:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1626209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a cold night in December 1946, Dr. Henry Jones Jr. finds himself grappling with ghosts from his past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Indiana Jones and the Chinatown Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Kate Bolin

 

 

December 18, 1946. New York City.

The Paramount Pictures logo faded into view on the screen, and all Indy could think, sitting in the dark theatre, empty seats on either side of him, was _Jesus, you can't get away from it. You come all the way to New York, as far from ravines and jungles and fucking mountains as you can get, you pay your forty cents, and what do they show you?_ He waited for the black-and-white mountain with its ring of stars to fade from the screen. It only took a second, but it made him impatient all the same.

He didn't even want to see "The Blue Dahlia" especially, he'd never much liked Raymond Chandler's books, all those people running around, slugging each other with blackjacks. He'd had enough of that to last him a lifetime. Several lifetimes. But it was midnight and he wasn't tired and hitting a movie beat walking the streets. Only maybe it didn't. He wasn't sure he felt like sitting still for an hour and a half. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, scratched under the rim of the eye patch. Still wasn't used to the damn thing. The doctor had told him he'd be able to drive again, that he'd re-learn depth perception, and maybe he would, but right now he just wished the goddamn patch wouldn't dig into his cheek the way it did.

If Sallah could hear him now. Mr. Tough Guy, used to be able to take a bullet in the arm and keep going full-steam, save the girl and get the gold and the hell with the pain, and now he was griping because his eye patch dug into his cheek. But it did. He'd rather have a bullet.

Two scenes into the movie, he got up, walked to the back of the theater and out into the cold. The usher called after him, "You okay, mister?" Indy didn't bother to answer him.

It had snowed two days earlier, and the snow was still piled up on the sidewalks, tramped down at the intersections into patches of ice that glinted under the streetlamps. Indy picked his way carefully, slowly, though his shoes gave him plenty of traction and there was nothing wrong with his sense of balance. He hadn't lost an ear, after all, just an eye. And he had another of those anyway; it wasn't like he was ready for a dog and a white cane. But he picked his way slowly and carefully all the same.

When he reached Times Square, he turned south onto Broadway. Traffic was light by New York standards, but there were still plenty of people and cars about. The theaters had let out long ago, but the roof garden revues were still going strong and would be well into the dead hours. Maybe that's how I should kill some time, Indy thought, a revue. Dancing girls and a comic or two and a small band trying to ape the big band sound. And a drink. Or two. Maybe after a drink or two, the music would sound better and the girls would look prettier, even to a one-eyed man.

He rubbed his palm along his chin, felt the day's growth of stubble there, looked down at his battered leather jacket, a relic from the war. They didn't let you in the better roof gardens with stubble and a leather jacket, and the ones that would let you in—Times Square's famous fabulous clip joints—you didn't want any piece of.

No, this was no place for him tonight. Times Square was a land of lights, a thousand million lamps blazing against the night. Lights and laughter and high spirits. What he needed was a dark room where no one would notice him, where he could wait for the dawn in the company of his quiet, sleepless thoughts.

There were such places in New York City. There was every sort of place in New York City, if you knew where to look for it. And Indy knew where to look for it. He flagged down a cab, climbed into the back seat, kicked the crust of snow off his shoes. "Mott Street," he said. "Way down at the end, where it gets all narrow and crooked."

"You mean down by the Bowery?" the driver said, looking up at him in the rearview.

Indy grinned and let his eye slide shut. "That's right. Take me to the Bowery, where I belong."

#

Eleven Mott Street was a brick tenement, but the owner had done the front of it up to look like a pagoda. Anywhere else in the city, that would have made the building stand out, but plenty of the buildings here had been done up to look like pagodas, or the nearest facsimile you could build with ten dollars worth of plywood and paste. Up at the north end of Mott Street, near Bleecker, the buildings looked the way you might expect, with proper stoops and lights over the doorways; but down here past Pell Street, half the buildings loomed crookedly and the lights above the doors were mostly burnt out or shattered. What illumination there was came from slants of moonlight penetrating the thicket of washlines overhead to the sidewalk below—that, and from the flare of matches, igniting the bobbing brick-red coals of cigarettes.

As the taxi pulled over to the curb, Indy heard the thunder and squeal of a train arriving at the Third Avenue El station over at Chatham Square.

Indy paid his driver and got out, made his way to the middle of the block. There was no snow here, he noticed, and he imagined the army of children and wives who must have been mobilized to shovel it all away. No matter what some sanctimonious uptown reformers liked to say, Chinatown wasn't broken. It just had its own rules. And there were times those rules seemed to operate better than the way people lived on Park Avenue or in the gated townhouses of Union Square.

When he reached the door, Indy raised his fist to knock, but it opened before his knuckles could land. Standing in the doorway was an old Chinese man, completely hairless, the top of his head gleaming in the light from the pair of paper lanterns suspended from the ceiling. He ushered Indy inside and closed the door behind him.

"It's been too long, Mo-Tse," Indy told him in Chinese, and the old man patted him on the elbow.

"Come. Come." He said it in English, a reflex from serving an evening's worth of slumming round-eyes. Then in Chinese: "Your eye, it still gives you pain?"

"No," Indy answered. "No more pain."

He followed Mo-Tse upstairs to a room where a dozen tables were scattered, each with a flickering candle inside a paper shade. Orange shadows clustered on the walls, shifting lazily. Behind a bar on the far wall a woman stood pouring liquor from one bottle to another using a funnel. Her face lit up. "Indy!"

Indy nodded. "Lily."

She pulled a glass down from an overhead rack. "We've got some nice Yuk-Bing Shiujiu."

"Fenjiu," Indy said, "and leave the bottle."

She poured him a small measure, which he downed in one swallow. When he set the glass down again, she tugged him closer by the necktie. "You're not going to get drunk and smash the place up again, are you, Indiana Jones?"

"Not the place," he said. "Just myself."

She looked in his eye, held him for a while longer, then released her grip on his tie. He smoothed it down, tucked the end under his belt. Then he picked up the empty glass and the bottle, carried them both to a table in the corner. He licked his thumb and forefinger, reached into the paper shade, and snuffed the candle flame. Carefully he tipped the bottle and poured his second drink of the evening, then sat back and sipped it, his face lost in shadows.

"Some food, Indy?" Mo-Tse said. "The kitchen is still open next door."

As far as Indy knew, the kitchen next door never closed. Till midnight, it served tourists under the uptown-friendly name "Port Arthur," but after Port Arthur drew its shades for the night there was plenty of cooking still going on for people in the neighborhood, for the gamblers feverishly counting fan-tan beads and pai gow pips in a dozen back rooms, for the exhausted whores in their narrow curtained alcoves upstairs in this very building, and, yes, for the occasional sorry drunk hoping that a bowl of rice might soak up a bit of the alcohol he was taking in, thereby enabling him to prolong his night of self-dismantling.

"Sure," Indy said. "Thank you."

"What would you like?"

"Whatever they've got."

Mo-Tse headed downstairs.

"Indy," Lily said. She'd come out from behind the bar and over to where he was sitting. "Why'd you come back?"

"You'll need to be more specific," he said. "Why'd I come back to the U.S.? Why'd I come back to New York?"

"Why'd you come back to my bar," she said.

He swallowed some more of the powerful rice wine, bit at the knuckle of his thumb till the burn subsided. "Do I need a reason?"

"Yes. Yes you do."

"I couldn't sleep," Indy said.

"There are bars uptown," Lily said.

"There's uptown uptown," Indy said.

"And downtown? What is there for you here, Indy?"

He looked at her, heard the edge of longing and invitation in her voice, and he remembered her small bedroom under the building's gabled roof, the single mullioned window letting in whispers of cold air through the dozen fissures in the molding. He remembered her willing body, supple, straining beneath him, both of them silent so as not to wake her uncle in the next room. He remembered holding her in his arms till she fell asleep, then gently disentangling himself, getting dressed in darkness, and swinging the window open to make his exit undetected.

It was tempting. But she deserved better; better than a battered, one-eyed ghost who comes and goes in the night.

"Fenjiu," he said finally. "That's what there is for me here."

"That's all?"

"That's all."

She turned, walked off, and Indy bent his head. _What's that I smell?_ he thought. _Ah, yes. The fragrant aroma of burning bridges._

That called for a drink. Fortuitously, he had a bottle and a glass in front of him, and a hand to pour and a mouth to swallow and a brain to drown in lakes of liquor, only it would take a good deal more pouring and swallowing to get it to that point. Well, have at it, old boy. Time's wasting.

He was pouring again when he heard the clatter of footsteps on the staircase.

Mo-Tse's head came into view first, then his shoulders, then the heads of the two men climbing the stairs behind him, then the three behind them. Mo-Tse looked anxious, the others grim. As he reached the top, one of the other men laid a hand on his shoulder blade and gave him a shove that sent him staggering forward and down onto one knee.

Indy half rose from his seat, then thought better of it and sank back into the shadow of his corner.

It was five against one; he had no gun, no knife, not even his whip. Also, no depth perception. And the men each had twenty years on him easy, maybe more: one of them looked like he might be a teenager. They wore the knee-length black suit coats that marked them as members of the On Leong society, and that meant each of them would be carrying not only a .44 but most likely a gravity knife as well, if not one of the fist-sized hatchets he knew some of them wore in snap-sheaths at their waists.

One of the On Leong men stepped forward. His hair was shaved down to a fine layer of stubble, shorter than any army crew cut. The others wore theirs long, in sleek queues. "You owe your remittance," he said to Mo-Tse, down on the floor. "You have not paid. Why do you make us come and collect? Why?" His Mandarin was flavored with an accent Indy remembered from the streets of Shanghai.

"We paid..." Mo-Tse said.

"You did not pay. Not for two months now. You are not calling me a liar, are you?" The man made a gesture and two of the others came forward and hauled Mo-Tse to his feet, holding tight to his forearms.

"I wouldn't want to hurt you, grandfather, but you know as well as I, I must collect."

Indy weighed his options. He couldn't just sit and watch—but what exactly could he do? He lifted the wine bottle by the neck and prepared to get up if it proved necessary.

_"Let him go."_

Lily stepped forward.

"Let him go, Wan Li. He's not the one at fault. I am."

"Don't—" Mo-Tse said. Then, to the men holding him, "Please, she just says that to protect me. Don't listen to her."

The two remaining men took up positions on either side of Lily. They looked to Wan Li for instructions.

Indy saw the knife in Lily's fist about the same time the man on her left did. She had already begun to swing it up toward his belly while pivoting with her hip and shooting her right leg toward the other man's groin. The kick connected—but the knife did not. The man on her left caught her wrist and turned it cruelly till the blade fell to the floor. On her other side, the man was clutching his privates and cursing.

Indy found himself on his feet, the bottle in one hand, but still hidden in the shadows. Once, he would have waded into the fight without hesitation. More than once he had. More than once in this very bar. But that was years ago; it was another man who'd done those things.

"Hold her," Wan Li said, reaching into his jacket.

"Indy!" Lily screamed. "For god's sake, Indy, do something!"

Indy reluctantly stepped forward out of the shadows and into the flickering orange light, upended wine bottle raised, liquor splashing out onto the floor.

 _Jesus,_ he thought, _what am I getting myself into?_

Wan Li's head had snapped around when he'd heard Lily's words. Now he stared at Indy and his face drained of color, almost as if the man standing before him really were a ghost.

"Let them go," he said.

"But—"

"Let them go!" His subordinates stepped away from Mo-Tse and Lily, backed away to the staircase.

"Leave. "

Indy could see the confusion on their faces; he imagined his looked similar. But the men did as they were told, retreating down the stairs. He heard the door open and slam behind them.

Then the young man came forward.

He hesitated. "Dr. Jones?" he said.

And the years vanished. The voice, the accent, the shape of his face, it all suddenly fell into place.

Indy lowered the wine bottle. "Shorty?" he said.

#

"You two know each other?" Lily sounded astonished, almost outraged. She was rubbing her wrist.

For a moment, neither man spoke. "We did once," Indy said, and Wan Li nodded. "Ten years ago."

"Eleven," Wan Li said.

"Eleven."

"Wan Li," Mo-Tse said, "I will pay, I assure you..."

Indy saw Wan Li's face tense with embarrassment. As well it should. What had he become in the years since Indy had seen him last? A bag man for Chinatown's protection racket? As a ten-year-old in Shanghai he'd never have lowered himself to that. He might have picked a pocket or two, might have steered some visiting servicemen to a brothel for the coins they'd flip his way, but he'd never have signed on to do strong-arm work for a tong. Bending the law was one thing—but the boy had been a basically good kid, and a fighter, and independent as hell. It was one of the things that had drawn Indy to him; it had reminded Indy of himself as a boy.

"What's happened to you?" Indy said.

The younger man reddened. "Me? What about you? You look terrible."

"Maybe," Indy said. "But I'm not shaking down women and old men for money."

Wan Li's hand darted toward his jacket, but he checked himself, let his hand drop to his side. "They undertook an obligation. They must make good—"

"Come off it, Shorty. "

"Don't call me that," Wan Li said.

"Shorty?" Lily said.

"He called himself 'Short Round,' " Indy said. "When I knew him. I don't think he knew what the words meant."

"I knew what they meant."

"He listened to American baseball on the radio, and boxing, and Bob Hope. Picked up bits of expressions. Shortstop. Ninth round. Holy smokes."

This time he didn't check himself. Wan Li's hand swept in under his lapel and came out with a knife whose long blade slid into place with a click. "Stop it," he said.

"Or what," Indy said. "You'll stab me?"

For an instant Indy thought he might. It would make the night complete. Old friends. Liquor. Blood. It was the way he'd always thought he would go. Only not at this boy's hands.

But the point of the knife was quivering, and in his face Indy could see what Lily and Mo-Tse, standing behind him, could not: a storm boiling beneath the surface, a flow of tears barely checked.

"Sit down, Shorty," Indy said. "Have a drink with me."

"Not here." He bit the words off. "Not here."

"All right," Indy said. "Where do you want to go?"

"Down."

"Indy, don't," Mo-Tse said. "This is a very dangerous man—"

"Yes, I'm sure he is," Indy said. "He was dangerous at ten. But that dangerous ten-year-old saved my life. And I saved his. He won't hurt me now. Will you?"

"No," Wan Li whispered.

"Then put the knife away," Indy said gently. The blade disappeared into the handle; the handle vanished up the young man's sleeve. "Thank you."

Wan Li pointed to the stairs.

Indy stopped with one hand on the banister and waved the young man ahead of him. "They say you're very dangerous," Indy said. "You go first."

#

On the street, Wan Li led him past the shuttered Port Arthur to the end of the block, where the pitted steel beams of the elevated train tracks cast the street into even deeper shadow. One movie house marquee was still lit, the Park Row's sign offering "2 Features, 2 Comedys Daily." Wan Li rounded the corner to Doyers Street and stopped in front of a plain metal door. He knocked in a rat-a-tat rhythm and the door opened. Behind it, holding onto the knob, was a boy of maybe fourteen. His eyes narrowed distrustfully when he saw Indy standing behind Wan Li. "It's okay," Wan Li said. "He's with me."

Indy followed him along a short corridor, then down a steep flight of stairs. At the bottom he heard the wailing of an erhu, the one-stringed cello from which Chinese musicians somehow effortlessly drew melodies of infinite sadness. A man's voice rose and fell with the music. The narrow, curving tunnel they were in extended past an open doorway and through it Indy saw a crowd seated on low wooden benches. In the front rows, the men all wore the black coats of the On Leong while in the rear they had on the crimson vests and arm garters of the Hip Sing. Outside, on the street, they'd have been at each other's throats—but here they sat quietly and respectfully while the heavily made-up men onstage played their parts.

Past the auditorium were several dark storefronts, their signs advertising herbs and tailoring and gemstone appraisal in hand-lettered Chinese characters. Indy had heard rumors of tunnels beneath the streets of Chinatown and had figured they were probably true—but he'd pictured rough-hewn stone walls and dirt floors, not a shopping arcade.

Wan Li stopped in front of a closed metal gate, raised it a few feet, and ducked underneath. He held it till Indy followed, then let it drop with a clatter to the ground.

Inside, the small room was dark until Wan Li turned on a table lamp. Then the dim light illuminated the cluttered interior of a flower shop. There were glass cases along the walls, rows of ceramic vases lined up on shelves, a wooden counter scored from the trimming of a thousand stems. A heavy cash register sat in one corner, its drawer open and emptied for the night.

"Whose store is this?"

"My uncle," Wan Li said.

"You're an orphan," Indy said.

Wan Li shook his head. "I have a family now."

"The On Leong?"

"The On Leong."

Indy idly pulled open one of the cases, inhaled the scent of damp leaves and petals. He let the door swing shut. "Are you happy, Shorty? With your new family?"

"Happy? Was I happy in Shanghai? I was hungry all the time—I had no room left to be happy."

"You never went hungry with me."

"In India—"

"There was food," Indy said. "You didn't want to eat it."

"Eyeballs, brains, bugs. I remember that food."

A sad smile crept onto Indy's face. "It was horrible, wasn't it."

"God, yes."

They stood in silence, Wan Li leaning against the counter, Indy against the door of the case. "I thought you were in San Francisco," Indy said.

"I was. For a time. I didn't speak much English. There were no jobs. Only work I could find was as a dishwasher in a restaurant. Can you see me doing that, Dr. Jones? Washing dishes?"

"Why not? I've done it."

"You?"

"In Greece. Athens. When I was about your age."

Wan Li shook his head. "Well, I didn't want it. Unfortunately, the police in San Francisco are more vigilant than their cousins in Shanghai and they take a dim view of pickpockets. I had to leave the city in a hurry."

"New York's a long way from San Francisco."

"I was in Chicago for a while. Then the war started. People thought I looked Japanese."

"And they didn't here?"

"Nobody cares what you look like here."

Indy came forward, ran his fingers along the lapel of the younger man's coat, smoothing it down. Short Round. What had that little boy thought the words meant anyway? He'd been short, of course; he'd never been round. Indy remembered him as a skinny, feral child, darting through the squares and alleys of his city. He remembered him in the catacombs beneath the Pankot Palace, and on the bridge; he could have died that day, so easily, they both could have. He remembered putting him on the plane bound for the U.S., a refugee agency waiting to take him in at the other end, to give him a good home with an American family who'd raise him. He'd pictured him in the years since as an adolescent in California, going to baseball games, eating hotdogs at the ballpark, dating girls. Not this. Not this.

"You collect money for a gang," Indy said. "When people don't pay, you hurt them."

"People pay. They know better than to not pay."

"You hurt people, Shorty. You hurt Mo-Tse."

"He's okay."

"He's an old man and you pushed him the floor."

"I pushed him to the floor? _I pushed him to the floor?_ Listen to you. How many men have you killed? How many? Shot, strangled, broke their necks. With me watching. I was ten!" He sounded disgusted. "I pushed him to the floor."

"Yes, I killed people," Indy said. "People who wanted to kill me, or you. I never hurt anyone who didn't deserve it."

"What about Willie?"

That shut him up. Tonight was a night for faces from his past. Willie Scott's floated up from the depths of his memory where he'd consigned it. Willie in her red gown of Shanghai satin, Willie wearing one of his shirts and nothing else. Willie at the end, in her raincoat and that hat, a suitcase in each hand, no hand left to wipe the tears running down her cheeks. Indy remembered shutting the door on her. Why had it ended? Why did it always end? She'd needed something from him he wasn't prepared to give her. He wondered what she was doing now. Hell. Maybe she was collecting for a gang, too.

"So what happened to your eye?" Wan Li said.

"I lost it," Indy said.

"How?"

"Car crash," Indy said.

"How could—"

"Drop it," Indy said, and Wan Li did. Neither man said anything for a moment.

"There's a doctor down here, he fits people for glass eyes—"

"Drop it."

"Okey-doke, Dr. Jones," Wan Li said softly.

"I tried a glass eye. It hurt."

"Maybe it was too big."

"Sure. Maybe"

"Maybe you like wearing an eye patch."

"I _hate_ wearing an eye patch."

Wan Li reached out toward Indy's face and Indy seized his wrist. Wan Li tried to move his hand forward but Indy held it tight.

He whispered, "You're hurting my wrist, Dr. Jones."

"Like hell I am." Under his fingers, the muscles of the boy's arm felt rock hard.

"Why won't you let me see?"

Indy thought about it. Why won't I? Why indeed. Of all people, this boy is maybe the one I have the least to hide from. He's seen me at my very worst.

He let go, let his hand fall.

Wan Li stretched out a finger, slipped a fingernail under the rim of the stiff leather and levered it up. He gently took the patch off.

Beneath it, Indy knew, the skin was scarred and puckered, an absence, a grave depression. His good eye flicked back and forth across Wan Li's face. A look of horror was swiftly replaced by one of sadness.

"Did it hurt a lot?" Wan Li said.

Indy nodded. "Not at first. The shock, the adrenaline. But by the time I made it to a doctor..."

"Where were you?"

"Berlin."

"You go where the action is, don't you?"

"Not any more, kid," Indy said. "Not any more."

Wan Li held out the eye patch and Indy took it, strung it over his head, fitted the stiff cap in place over the sinkhole where his eye had been. Like capping a dead oil well, he thought. Like piling stones on a grave.

Wan Li walked behind him, paced back into view.

"Shorty?"

"What."

"Is this what you want to be doing? Working for the rackets?"

"It's okay," Wan Li said.

"You can do better."

"Like what?" Wan Li stopped pacing, stared him down. "A white picket fence and a dog and two kids? They don't give white picket fences to people who look like me."

"I thought nobody cares what you look like."

"Here nobody cares. Where they build the white picket fences, they care plenty."

Indy said stubbornly, "You can still do better than this."

"Oh yeah? And what about you? You land your fortune and glory yet, Dr. Jones?"

"Fortune and glory," Indy said. "You've got a good memory."

"Yeah," Wan Li said. "I do. I remember everything you told me. You remember what you said at the airport?"

"Which airport?"

"Which airport. The one where you put me on a plane bound for the land of opportunity. You remember what you said?"

"I can't take care of you," Indy whispered.

"And you remember what I told you?" Wan Li said.

"You don't have to, I can take care of myself."

"You have a good memory, too, Dr. Jones."

"I couldn't, Shorty. There were places I couldn't go with a kid. I needed to be on my own."

"Every night," Wan Li said. "Every night for five years I lay in bed and I thought about where you were and what you were doing and I hated you for sending me away. I _hated_ you. It was like—"

Indy wasn't sure he wanted to hear the answer, but he said, "What? It was like what?"

"It was like, how many fathers can one poor son of a bitch lose?"

Indy pulled him close, one arm around his narrow waist, the other at the back of his neck. Wan Li resisted, strained against his grip, but then he stopped fighting, and suddenly they were both weeping, two men, the younger and the older, with so much of life between them, so much of death and loss and remembrance. Indy felt the boy's head against his shoulder, the stubble on his scalp against the stubble of Indy's beard. Indy leaned forward and kissed the top of his head. He felt the boy's tears on the side of his neck, suddenly released, and his own, pent up, started to flow, and he thought to himself, the one good thing about it, the one good thing: you can only cry half as much.

#

Three in the morning, and the splinters of light showing from behind shuttered windows had finally all gone out. The trains still ran overhead, but no one stood on the platforms to greet them. The crowds in the streets were gone, and with them the old men sitting on the steps and balconies. One man lay huddled in a doorway, asleep or drunk or swept away on an opium high; or dead, perhaps, on a cold night like this you couldn't say.

Indy followed the crooked, twisting path of Doyers Street past the old church with its high stone wall, chipped and scarred from decades of gunfire, past the dark tea houses and barbershops, till he came out on Pell Street; and from there he found his way back to Mott. At the far end of the street, he saw a beat cop pass, swinging his nightstick. It brought no great measure of safety to these streets, the hourly police patrols, but it brought a measure of comfort to the citizens uptown, knowing that the cops were on the job, keeping the rabble in line.

Indy waited and watched, in case the cop might return, then walked between the two nearest buildings and reached up to snag the bottom rung of a fire escape ladder. He pulled himself up hand over hand till he reached the first landing then quietly climbed the rest of the way to the roof. From there it was a short walk across the moonlit stretch of tarpaper to the parapet at building's edge, where Indy let himself down to the roof of the neighboring tenement. Looking down past the triangular gable of the roof, he could see the small balcony on the top floor, barely wide enough to stand, and the mullioned window behind it.

He climbed down slowly, carefully, and when he was sure his footing was secure pressed gently on the glass and swung it inward, stepped inside.

Lily stirred in bed, turned to face the window, but didn't open her eyes. Indy stood, silhouetted in the darkness. He watched her and thought of the last night he'd stood here, years ago.

_Why come back? Why? What did seeing Short Round awaken in you?_

He had no answer. He was restless; it was a restless night and still far—too far—from over. He'd come here imagining...but no. It had been a mistake. Thank god he hadn't woken her. He could leave, vanish in the night, find another bar, another street—

"Indy," Lily murmured, her voice thick with sleep.

He stood in silence.

"What happened?" she murmured. "Where'd he take you?"

"Nowhere," he whispered.

"Will he come back?"

"Probably. Maybe. I asked him not to."

She said nothing; her breathing was soft and slow. It almost seemed she'd fallen asleep again. But then she said, "And you. Indy. Will you come back?" and he saw that her eyes were open.

"No," Indy said.

She nodded sadly, her cheek sliding against the sheet.

"But you'll stay tonight," she murmured. "Old time's sake."

"Yes," Indy said, coming to the bed. "For old time's sake."

#

 


End file.
